Today, many pharmaceutical products are administered in liquid form. However, many pharmaceutical products and particularly biopharmaceutical products are highly unstable in liquid form. Therefore, often pharmaceutical products are provided in a freeze-dried or lyophilized form in which they are essentially more stable and robust compared to its liquid form. Before being applied, the lyophilized pharmaceutical products are reconstituted or solved in a diluent or liquid.
Lyophilized pharmaceutical products or drugs are often delivered in a suitable container having a neck with an exterior thread such as in a glass or plastic bottle or the like. For safety reasons the container typically is closed by a child resistant closure (CRC) having a cap screwed on the neck. For preparing the drug before administration the cap is removed, a specified amount of a liquid is provided into the container, the cap is screwed on the neck of the container again and the drug is mixed with the liquid inside the container. For mixing the drug and the liquid, the closed container can be shaken until the drug is completely solved.
Once prepared the drug is ready for being administered in liquid form. To allow provision of a specific dosage out of the container oral dispensers such as scaled oral syringes can be used. Thereby, the container is opened by removing the CRC cap from the neck, a dosage of the drug is withdrawn by the oral dispenser, the drug is injected out of the oral dispenser into the mouth of a patient, the container is closed by replacing the cap on the neck again and the oral dispenser is washed.
For connecting oral dispensers to containers it is known to use adapters which allow for a precise and essentially leakage-free withdrawal of the drug from the container. Some of these adapters have to be pushed into the neck of the container. These adapters have an orifice through which the oral dispenser can access the interior of the container for withdrawing the drug. However, since the adapter and the container have to be tightly connected such pushing often requires a comparably strong insertion force. This can make the connecting difficult, for example with respect to preventing the container from falling or the like. Also, such pushed-in adapters can self-eject from the neck and have to be re-inserted before connecting an oral dispenser to the container. In addition, the handling of pushed-in adapters in some instances forces the user to touch or contact the dosing orifice of the pushed-in adapter.
For addressing these problems there are adapters used which are screwed on the neck of the container. For example, an adapter is known having a body piece and a jacket piece. The body and jacket pieces each have an essentially cylindrical shape. The body piece has an open container end side and an opposite end side with an orifice for being accessed by an oral dispenser. It further has an inner container thread oriented towards the container end side for being screwed on the neck of a container. The jacket piece has on its outer surface a cap thread onto which a cap of a CRC can be screwed.
The jacket piece is arranged on the body piece and completely covers it. The inner side of the jacket piece and the outer side of the body piece are equipped with ratchet means allowing the jacket piece to be rotated around the body piece in one direction but blocking a rotation of the jacket around the body piece in the other direction. In particular, the ratchet means are adapted such that the jacket piece and the body piece can together be screwed on the neck of the container. However, when turning the jacket piece in the other direction it rotates around the body piece and the adapter is not unscrewed from the container. Like this, the adapter can be mounted to the container such that it can not be removed therefore afterwards.
A drawback of this kind of known adapters is that they are comparably complicated by having plural pieces interacting in a comparably complicated manner. Thus, manufacture of the adapter can be comparably cumbersome. Furthermore, in some situations it can also be desired to remove the adapter from the container again which is not possible with such known adapters.
Therefore, there is a need for an adapter providing for an efficient and safe connection of a dispenser to a container particularly in order to allow the dispenser to precisely and safely withdraw a substance from the container.